Contact Information
Biography Information
Maxim Matusevich is Assistant Professor of World History at Seton Hall University. A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, he received his BA in History from the University of Oklahoma, and then obtained his MA and Ph.D. in African Studies and African History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1999 he served as Visiting Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria. His first book No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960-1991 (Africa World Press, 2003) reflected an enduring interest in the history of political and cultural encounters between Africa and the Soviet Union. Most recently he edited and contributed to an interdisciplinary volume Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Africa World Press, 2006). In 2007 he was awarded a short-term residential research fellowship at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC.
Project Description
This project expands the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of East European and African studies and establishes a natural link between the two fields. Reflective of the growing scholarly and popular interest in diasporic and transnational narratives my research focuses on the history and significance of African presence in the “Soviet spaces.” The explosion of racism and xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia has its fuse going deep into the Soviet past. This study will reveal and explore the utility of Africa and Blackness not only in the official foreign policy discourse of the Soviet Union but also in the Soviet everyday. While the African-Russian connection rarely attracted serious and sustained scholarly attention either in Russia or in the West it, in fact, represents a uniquely singular transnational story of political and cultural encounters and adaptation. In this respect, the project has a special interdisciplinary agenda to dramatically expand the newly emerging field of Black European Studies. By establishing the essential continuity of Russian-African ties from past to present I would like to “de-exoticize” this historical connection, an important scholarly and educational task indeed considering that the many myths and misrepresentations surrounding the history of African presence in Russia have provided a fertile ground for the growth of post-Soviet racism.